Earlier this year we started the International Ethics Project, a collaboration between physiotherapy departments from several countries who intend offering an online course in professional ethics to their undergraduate students. You can read more about the project here.
In June we started the process of developing a questionnaire that we can use to establish some baseline data on students’ levels of digital literacy. It’s taken a bit longer than expected but we’ve finally managed to complete the reliability testing of the questionnaire as part of a pilot study. Before we can begin planning the module and how it will be implemented we need to get a better understanding of how our population – drawn as they are from several countries from around the world – uses digital tools in the context of their learning practices. The results of the reliability study showed that most of the survey items had Kappa values between 0.5 – 0.6 (indicating moderate agreement); 0.7 – 0.8 (indicating strong agreement); or >0.8 (indicating almost perfect agreement). See this post on the project blog for more details on how the reliability testing was conducted.
Now that we have conducted quite a rigorous piloting of the questionnaire, we hope that this questionnaire might be useful for other health professional educators who are considering the use of digital tools in their classrooms. To this end we would like to report the results of this pilot, along with some preliminary results, at the ER-WCPT conference on 11-12 November, 2016 in Liverpool. We will therefore be submitting an abstract for the conference in the coming months.
